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I made a diagram yesterday that contrasts #ActivityPub and #SolidProject that is I think interesting to consider.

In the past I've been very active on the Solid forum, and tried to get a collab going with #SocialHub community. A number of points that existed then, are still issues today I think.

Like, though anyone could participate in the standards process via chat, the Solid team and Inrupt were not really interested in their community, hardly giving attention while people were building interesting stuff there.

Also at the time basically all available code was Javascript, making Solid uninteresting or hard to access for other language devs.

But I think biggest issue was that Solid didn't know what it was. It was positioned as 'personal data vault' on the landing page then (but not using this term), but was 'secretly' TBL's desire to reboot the #SemanticWeb. The new web would be all 'Solid apps'. But the adoption strategy for that didn't exist.

just small circles 🕊

@smallcircles@social.coop replied · last month

@reiver @thisismissem @mfru

Here's the diagram btw: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116113963712755122

The problem of #SolidProject knowing what it is, is more an inherited problem of #LinkedData / #SemanticWeb knowing what it is.

Semantic web always was "if only all information on the web were semantic and machine-readable, then...". And there it stopped. Presumably magic would happen.

And perhaps it would. But to make such a big leap, a paradigm shift of the entire web, along the way you have inspire a whole lot of people to set the (r)evolution in motion and keep it going.

If you look at what linked data is, it is a very low-level format. Nice if you have it, but now what are you going to build with it? There are some good application areas, but the case for linked data elsewhere is not a given.

Still today there are regular discussions on 'what would be the killer app for Solid' or linked data in general. Saw some interest for LLM's fed semantic data to make them more deterministic. I'm not interested.

just small circles 🕊

@smallcircles@social.coop replied · last month

@reiver @thisismissem @mfru

The chicken/egg of getting good tool support for Linked Data et al remains a serious issue.

The standards are complex and intertwined with each other in intricate ways. Regular devs need to be shielded from that, and have tools that allow them to focus on solving problems, building solutions, satisfying needs.

Without the tools, barrier to entry is real high. But because of that there are also less folks who build and improve tools.

Last problem that is important to mention, is more a social issue. The generalized "dev community" has made up their mind that they dislike linked data, just as they did before on XML, for instance. It is a particular mindset that has taken hold, caused by the first hype cycle around Semantic web, where it didn't deliver.

I'd advise anyone in LD space to incrementally prove value solution-side, and not emphasize too much on linked data as unique selling point. Alongside strengthen the ecosystem to get better tool support.

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